Category Archives: Peru

‘All of Peru is fired up’: protesters fill streets after ousting of president

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  • Fierce clashes with police leave at least 11 wounded
  • Biggest demonstrations in two decades follow impeachment

Fierce clashes in Peru between police and protesters have wounded at least 11 people, doctors and rights groups said on Friday, as thousands of Peruvians took to the streets to protest against the ousting of President Martín Vizcarra.

The clashes, and other more peaceful protests in the capital Lima and other cities, are piling pressure on a fragmented congress and the new government of Manuel Merino. Thursday night’s rallies were among the largest in two decades in Peru.

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Peruvians take to the streets to protest against president’s ousting – video

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Protests erupted in the Peruvian capital, Lima, following the surprise ousting of President Martín Vizcarra, who lost an impeachment vote he had been expected to survive. Allegations of corruption marred Vizcarra's presidency in the last few months, culminating in the vote. Vizcarra said he would not challenge the decision, but Peruvians took to the streets to voice their anger. Despite the accusations of corruption against Vizacarra, which analysts have deemed minor, the public supported his efforts to fight corruption in the government's highest levels

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‘Prevent, discourage, confront’: South American states tackle Chinese trawlers

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Huge fleets’ intrusions into Pacific fishing territory prompt Chile, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru to join forces

Related: 'It's terrifying': can anyone stop China's vast armada of fishing boats?

Four South American countries have joined forces in a bid to combat illegal fishing by huge Chinese fleets off their coasts.

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Cat and mouse on the high seas: on the trail of China’s vast squid fleet

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Huge foreign fleets gather 400 miles off South America’s Pacific coast attracted by giant squid. Peru’s coastguard must defend its territorial waters amid rising tension

The ocean is as black as chipped obsidian, yet whichever way you look dozens of bright lights illuminate the water and the night sky. Nearly 400 nautical miles from the South American mainland, the crew of a Peruvian coastguard ship count more than 30 Chinese squid boats lighting up the sea like a city at night.

Some of the boats shine luminous green, others glow blinding white like an alien spacecraft in a movie. Rigged along each side of the ships, incandescent lamps attract giant squid near the surface, where they can be hauled from the ocean by long metal arms jutting over the water.

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Huge cat found etched into desert among Nazca Lines in Peru

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Feline geoglyph from 200-100BC emerges during work at Unesco world heritage site

The dun sands of southern Peru, etched centuries ago with geoglyphs of a hummingbird, a monkey, an orca – and a figure some would dearly love to believe is an astronaut – have now revealed the form of an enormous cat lounging across a desert hillside.

The feline Nazca line, dated to between 200BC and 100BC, emerged during work to improve access to one of the hills that provides a natural vantage point from which many of the designs can be seen.

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Peru opens Machu Picchu ruins for one tourist

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Japanese tourist waited almost seven months to enter Inca citadel while trapped in country during coronavirus pandemic

Peru has opened the ruins of Machu Picchu for a single Japanese tourist after he waited almost seven months to enter the Inca citadel, while trapped in the Andean country during the coronavirus outbreak.

Jesse Takayama’s entry into the ruins came thanks to a special request he submitted while stranded since mid-March in the town of Aguas Calientes, on the slopes of the mountains near the site, said the minister of culture, Alejandro Neyra, on Monday.

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Peru lawmakers begin impeachment of president Martín Vizcarra

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Leader faces being removed for ‘moral incapacity’ after tapes revealed alleged ties to a singer involved in a fraud case

The Peruvian president, Martín Vizcarra, faced a fresh challenge to his leadership on Friday after the Congress approved a motion to start impeachment proceedings against him over leaked audio tapes and alleged ties to a singer involved in a fraud case.

Whether to remove Vizcarra from office for “moral incapacity” is due to be debated and voted upon in the next week, which risks plunging the world’s second-largest copper producer further into crisis as it battles one of the worst coronavirus outbreaks globally amid its deepest recession in decades.

Vizcarra vowed not to resign.

Related: ‘They killed him’: widow confronts Peru's president over Covid-19 deaths

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European banks urged to stop funding oil trade in Amazon

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Indigenous people in headwaters region say financing harms communities and ecosystems

Indigenous people living at the headwaters of the Amazon have called on European banks to stop financing oil development in the region, as it poses a threat to them and damages a fragile ecosystem, after a new report found $10bn in previously undisclosed funding for oil in the region.

The headwaters of the Amazon in Ecuador and Peru are home to more than 500,000 indigenous people, including some who choose to live in voluntary isolation. The area, covering about 30m hectares (74m acres), hosts a diverse rainforest ecosystem, but it is threatened by the expansion of oil drilling.

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A dollar for sex: Venezuela’s women tricked and trafficked

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Women attempting to flee the country’s economic collapse are in desperate straits, stranded at borders and forced into sex work, say NGOs

The family had nothing at home, says mother of six Luisa Hernández, 30, from Zulia state, Venezuela. “To see your children grow up without food, without anything, is unbearable.

“Eating from rubbish bins to survive was no life, so we left. But, now with the pandemic, we are in limbo, we are stuck in Colombia, and hungry again. We have gone from one crisis to another.”

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Tsunami of fake news hurts Latin America’s effort to fight coronavirus

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More than 160,000 people have died but from Mexico to Brazil, social networks are awash with quack cures and conspiracies

For months Gustavo Andrade has been battling to convince his parishioners to take Covid-19 seriously.

Related: Desperate Bolivians seek out toxic bleach falsely touted as Covid-19 cure

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‘They killed him’: widow confronts Peru’s president over Covid-19 deaths

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Martín Vizcarra announced emergency decree putting health ministry in charge of system after Celia Capira chased his truck

As the presidential motorcade pulled away from the main hospital in Peru’s second city – fleeing an angry protest by medical staff and relatives of Covid-19 patients – one woman broke away from the crowd.

Celia Capira ran sobbing after the truck carrying the president, Martín Vizcarra, yelling for him to go and see for himself the grim conditions at the hospital, where her husband was fighting for his life.

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Alarm as Covid-19 reaches recently contacted Amazon tribe

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  • Activists fear devastation as virus arrives at indigenous reserve
  • At least six coronavirus cases among isolated Nahua people

The Covid-19 virus has reached a remote reserve for recently contacted indigenous people in the Peruvian Amazon, despite efforts to shield the extremely vulnerable population from the pandemic.

Related: 'Coronavirus could wipe us out': indigenous South Americans blockade villages

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Poverty, not just populists, to blame for Covid-19’s impact on Latin America

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Mexico and Brazil have been hit hard by the pandemic, but so too have countries that were quicker to respond

Coronavirus arrived in Latin America later than in Europe, but it has taken firm hold. A quarter of global confirmed cases are in the region, and researchers have warned the death toll is likely to triple by October to nearly 400,000.

The two countries with the deadliest outbreaks share populist leaders, Brazil’s rightwing Jair Bolsonaro and Mexico’s leftwing Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

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Herbal cures and no sanitation: the Lima residents battling Covid alone – in pictures

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Over 70% of the indigenous Peruvian community of Cantagallo Island have tested positive for coronavirus. This is how they are surviving lockdown

• All photographs by Florence Goupil, who received a grant from the Covid-19 National Geographic emergency fund for journalists

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Peru: at least 20 journalists died from Covid-19 as they covered pandemic

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Country is Latin America’s second worst-hit with more than 164,000 coronavirus cases and 4,500 deaths

At least 20 journalists have died from Covid-19 in Peru as reporters, photographers and camera operators raced to cover the pandemic’s spread through the country, often without protective equipment.

The number throws into sharp relief the risks and precarious work conditions which face journalists covering the global pandemic in the Andean country, which, after Brazil is Latin America’s worst-hit with more than 164,000 Covid-19 cases and 4,500 deaths.

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‘Now we sleep peacefully’: life in Peru transformed by warm houses

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Thermal houses in the Andes are helping combat respiratory illnesses in villages that struggle with freezing temperatures

On a windswept plain more than 4km above sea level, families gather; a throng of colourful, intricately patterned hats, skirts and ponchos. They are gazing curiously at their revamped homes, which now glint in the sun.

Cladding the mud brick homes and absorbing the perpendicular rays of the sun are polycarbonate panels fitted at a slanted angle to the outer walls. In Hanchipacha, a poor village in the highlands of Cusco, in Peru’s southeastern Andes, these panels are a point of pride.

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Peru’s coronavirus response was ‘right on time’ – so why isn’t it working?

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Peru was one of the first Latin America countries to go into lockdown – but the jump in new cases is undeniable, and experts say it’s due to people’s behaviour

Peru seemed to be doing everything right.

Its president, Martín Vizcarra, announced one of the earliest coronavirus lockdowns in Latin America on 16 March.

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‘Hubs of infection’: how Covid-19 spread through Latin America’s markets

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Authorities have struggled to enforce social distancing at the trading centres. At one Lima market, 79% of vendors had coronavirus

Four out of five merchants at a major fruit market in Peru have tested positive for coronavirus, revealing shocking levels of infection – and prompting fears that Latin America’s traditional trading centres may have helped spread Covid-19 across the region.

Seventy-nine per cent of stall-holders in Lima’s wholesale fruit market tested positive for Covid-19, while spot tests at five other large fresh food markets in the city revealed at least half were carrying the virus.

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‘We are living in a catastrophe’: Peru’s jungle capital choking for breath as Covid-19 hits

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Iquitos, still reeling from a dengue fever outbreak and plagued by poverty, relies on air deliveries for medicine, equipment and oxygen

In the final hours before Covid-19 claimed her life, Cecilio Sangama watched helplessly as his eldest sister Edith gasped for breath.

Hospitals across Peru’s largest Amazon city had run out of oxygen, and the shortage had pushed the black market price of a cylinder well above $1,000 (£810).

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Qantas staff ‘incredibly fearful’ about flights to rescue Australians trapped overseas

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Airline turns to New Zealand after failing to get sufficient volunteers from Australia amid coronavirus fears

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    • Qantas is moving to recruit cabin staff from its New Zealand subsidiary to operate scheduled flights to rescue Australians trapped overseas, after it failed to get sufficient volunteers from its Australian cabin staff to operate planned flights.

    Amid news that 50 Qantas and Jetstar staff have contracted coronavirus there has been growing anxiety among Qantas staff about plans to resume flights to Los Angeles, London, Auckland and Hong Kong later this week.

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